Just kidding, everyone survives. But the rest is accurate! This is the format for 9 Squares, a collaborative animation project in which serious creative constraints produce mesmerizing results.

Here's the gist: Nine designers are asked to create an abstract animated GIF. It has to live inside a 350-pixel square, it can't exceed three seconds, and it can only use four colors, predetermined by the organizers. The resulting compositions are arranged in a tight three-by-three grid, making for a hypnotic quilt of motion and color.

The project was born on Tumblr, long a fertile ground for motion design (itself a recently minted Emmy category, hey hey). The spark was a kinetic GIF by animator Al Boardman—a grid of colorful, hyperactive boxes. Another animator, David Stanfield, suggested it might be a fun format for a collaboration. Other artists piled on and the group posted the first animated tapestry to Tumblr in March.

Since then, the project has continued on a loose twice-monthly schedule, overseen by Boardman, Stanfield, and fellow animator Skip Dolphin Hursh. "The interest surrounding the first round was huge enough that we're now booked several rounds in advance pretty consistently," Hursh says. They recently published the sixth installment.

The format has proven inspired. Because of the constraints of time and especially color, the grids hang together to a surprising degree. They're frenzied and fragmentary but oddly coherent. Hursh says he tries to "recognize patterns and little moments of synchronicity" when he's arranging the squares. And yet, each tile is also a self-contained work with its own unique charms. So you get the pleasure of taking in the whole hyperactive tableau, and then nine more when you lean in and have a closer look.

On another level, 9 Squares is an exercise in blind collaboration, a candy-color grand-nephew of the Surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse. It's bred something of a community. "I’ve gotten to 'meet' several people online because of 9 Squares," Stanfield says. The third installment included both the person who taught him Adobe After Effects at his first motion graphics job and the guy whose work inspired him to pursue the motion graphics in the first place.

Most of all, though, the project is an instance where the cliché is true: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Singly, each animation is neat, but together they become something much more impressive—jewelry boxes full of fidgety treasures, or Rube Goldberg machines made of diverse components, each piece whirring with its own mad logic. However you look at it, that's a lot of spectacle for just three seconds.